Maurice Sendak: I don't write for children. I write, and somebody says...

And the walls became the world all around.

Maurice Sendak

wild-things wall world

And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.

Maurice Sendak

catharsis mean children

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

Maurice Sendak

mother boys children

I wish you all good things. Live your life, live your life, live your life.

Maurice Sendak

live-your-life good-things wish

Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.

Maurice Sendak

children reality moving

There must be more to life than having everything.

Maurice Sendak

environmental materialism life

To be a healthy person, you have to be sympathetic to the child you once were and maintain the continuity between you as a child and you as an adult.

Maurice Sendak

adults healthy children

Art has always been my salvation. And my gods are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I believe in them with all my heart. And when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can’t explain — I don’t need to. I know that if there’s a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart. Or if I walk in the woods and I see an animal, the purpose of my life was to see that animal. I can recollect it, I can notice it. I’m here to take note of. And that is beyond my ego, beyond anything that belongs to me, an observer, an observer.

Maurice Sendak

animal believe art

And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!

Maurice Sendak

wild-things cried max

Kids don't know about best sellers. They go for what they enjoy. They aren't star chasers and they don't suck up. It's why I like them.

Maurice Sendak

enjoy stars kids

You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

Maurice Sendak

writing book children

Children are the best living audience in the world because they are so thoroughly honest.

Maurice Sendak

honest children world

There's so much more to a book than just the reading.

Maurice Sendak

reading book

There should be a place where only the things you want to happen, happen.

Maurice Sendak

wild-things should want

An illustrator in my own mind - and this is not a truth of any kind - is someone who so falls in love with writing that he wishes he had written it, and the closest he can get to is illustrating it. And the next thing you learn, you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps even the author was not entirely aware of. And that's what you hold on to, and that's what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there.

Maurice Sendak

falling-in-love believe book

And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

Maurice Sendak

max lonely kings

We’ve educated children to think that spontaneity is inappropriate. Children are willing to expose themselves to experiences. We aren’t. Grownups always say they protect their children, but they’re really protecting themselves. Besides, you can’t protect children. They know everything.

Maurice Sendak

spontaneity children thinking

I was sickly as a child and gravitated to books and drawing. During my early teen years, I spent hundreds of hours at my window, sketching neighborhood children at play. I sketched and listened, and those notebooks became the fertile field of my work later on. There is not a book I have written or a picture I have drawn that does not, in some way, owe them its existence.

Maurice Sendak

notebook children years

I want to write something so simple, so short and so silly... and I want it to be for my brother.

Maurice Sendak

brother silly writing

There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready.

Maurice Sendak

wild-things beautiful world

I don't write for children. I write, and somebody says, 'That's for children.'